The second edition of my novel Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning was put out about a month and a half ago. We did a small run of the first edition last summer, but mostly to get it out there to some select individuals and so I could figure what sections pissed me off the most, (and as a result had to be axed.)

I'm terrible at playing to genre- but there are most likely the elements of quite a few authors in here, though none of it is intentional- Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and Warren would easily be on that list. A number of people have compared it to the Invisibles, which is kind of funny because I didn't get too far into the Invisibles, I have to admit, until somewhere around the second draft of this story. Having read all of it now, I can see why the comparison was made.

The book has black and white illustrations, but it's novel format, not graphic novel. In an ideal world I would have had full color illustrations... and would have done more full page ones... but this isn't an ideal world. Maybe a later edition, or more likely, a full color graphic novel that explores the past or future of one of the characters in the story.

We've also been producing a CC audiobook with an original soundtrack- the feed is here. (The CC version is 128 kbps. We may release a higher-res version later for a nominal fee. Hey, we're putting together 9 hours of soundtrack, and we gotta eat. ;P)

Most of what I write is for the screen, and I don't publish my short stories online so I can offer first publication rights when I submit them. (Is that totally crazy? If anyone on here knows more about publishing than me, I'd love to know.)

I've been self-publishing some political humor here, and some personal essay humor here.

I live in LA-- the ironic-fashion-sense capital of the world. There are parts of town where you can't even go if the expression on your t-shirt is not polar opposites with the way you actually feel and think. So when I was in Florida this Christmas, and my grandfather offered up this baseball cap, I snatched it with greedy delight.

My brother and step-sister scoffed with confused disgust. Why would I want such a hideous hat? And why, now that I had it, should they give me a ride back from Delray Beach?Because I am not a Hipster.

But I am the greatest one of them all.

Hipsters would see me on their excursions to the Sherman Oaks Galleria and hang their heads. For they'd pine, "Were he a Los Feliz-dwelling, horned-rimmed glasses wearing, tight-t-shirt besporting member of our kind, why, we'd bow down before him and follow his every intimation and declaration. We'd hoist him on our shoulders and cheer as he opened the old alpha-male's jugular with his jaws and be, thus anointed in his green-tinged hipster blood, our new leader."

"Our women would swoon and our men would nod our respect and tip our trucker-caps to him. In the old west, we would have named him the Sheriff of Silverlake."

But sorry, everyone. I am no Hipster. I will not be the one to lead you to take your place on the national arena. You will set no agenda, lead no debate.

You must find another messiah.

For I just came storming into your house, Hipsters. I just slam-dunked over you and tongue-kissed your mom. Feel violated? You should. Because you will never have a more hideous hat than this.

PS-- Does it burn you up inside that I actually like knishes? That's right. I'm not even wearing this hat ironically.

My name is Sean McDevitt and I'm the writer of Slip Kid from Ronin Studios.

I've been working on a novel and I thought I'd share a bit of the first chapter. The book is tentatively titled Planet XY and its about a guy who owns a comic book store and get reunited with a long lost love. It's a bit like Free Enterprise meets Clerks meets High Fidelity. I'd love to read any feedback -- good or bad.

Sure, Lois Lane is Superman’s girlfriend and Mary Jane Watson is the girlfriend of Peter Parker, the Amazing Spider-man, but in the real world when a girl finds out you are into comics, she’s usually looking for the quick exit.

Take Emily Lansford, for instance. We went out for a year and she never once told her friends that I owned a comic book store. She would introduce me at parties as a local business owner, which I’m assuming would conjure up some ideal three-piece suit wearing Wall Street-type. As a matter of fact, I look nothing like Charlie Sheen, but to be fair I look nothing like the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons either.

Emily was a tall strawberry blonde who liked tanning so much, she bought herself a tanning bed and installed it in her apartment. It was this monstrous thing in her bedroom. Regular bed. Tanning bed. It looked like some kind of chamber Michael Jackson went into to become more weird. It looked like a life-size toy from my Six Million Dollar Man collection.

She would cancel dates because she needed to go tan. I’d heard of canceling a date because the girl had to “wash her hair,” but this was a new one. I didn’t know someone could tan so much and not look like old leather. Or George Hamilton.

This was how it ended. She came over to my apartment. I was looking sharp with my khaki pants, preppy Tommy Hilfiger polo shirt and rimless glasses. She had on sweats. We were supposed to go out to dinner and maybe head to the club and meet friends. I could tell right away that plans were going to change.

“What are you wearing,” was the first thing I said to her as she came roaring into my apartment.

“I can’t go out. I look hideous.” She said this as if it was self apparent. It wasn’t.

I asked, “What are you taking about?” I really had no idea. Even in sweats, she looked amazing. Her strawberry blonde hair was long and straight and it extended to the small of her back. She had a long face with high cheekbones and a small nose. Her chestnut colored eyes were stunning. I used to love kissing her long neck.

I imagine there are many things that could make your skin crawl: spiders, Rosie O’Donnel having sex, snakes, Rosie O’Donnel having gay sex. Missing out on a tanning session for a few hours is not one of them.

I said, “Why don’t you just quit tanning. It makes you look all orange anyway. You look like a giant flaming carrot.” This was amusing to me because I had been reading The Flaming Carrot at the time. It wasn’t as amusing to Emily.

She found a Peter Criss doll, ahem, action figure I had sitting around my stereo (collected with the other KISS dolls, but they weren’t in easy reach) and threw it at me and stormed out. Pete’s arm broke, but, you know, it was just Peter Criss. It’s not like it was my Gene or Paul figures.

I hear she’s a fitness instructor back in her old hometown. I bet she gets to tan as much as she wants.

I write a lot of short stories but have not had the balls to submit. I'm currently working on a novel that takes place on a ski resort. The book may or may not involve dead children.

I've worked as a reader at a variety of literary magazines (I was on the editorial board of the Columbia Journal and interned at the New Yorker's fiction department), and recently my friends and I started an online lit mag called Fawlt.

Every issue focuses on a specific human flaw. So our first--which we published last year--was centered around self-delusion. Our second issue, which we want to release May 1 focuses on dependence. Dependence on another person, on a certain routine, on drugs, whatever.

So if any of you are working on a short story/essay/poem that fits the theme, PLEASE SUBMIT! We're at fiction(at)fawltmag.com and we're always looking to publish talented writers. I'm very proud of the work we're already hosting on our site. If you read it, you'll note we don't have a particular aesthetic. Some of our stories have that Raymond Carver K-Mart realism feel, others read like dark fairy tales. We have a few chapters from Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields that will be released by Knopf in 2009. Basically, a good eclectic mix.

Do we pay? No. We're poor and this magazine is a hardcore labor of love. We want first publishing rights, after which the property reverts back to the author.

TO HOWIE KAPLAN: When you get published in a literary journal, whether it's exclusively online (and there are good ones: pindeldyboz and guernica to name two) or print, you're almost always agreeing to first publishing rights (when in doubt, ask the editors and make sure it's clear). After publication, the work reverts back to you and the original publisher can no longer profit from it.

Yeah, I know Fawlt Mag isn't text. A point of embarrassment for us, as we do everything in-house and are better designers than HTML programmers. But that should change because in literally just a few hours, the site will be textual.

My name is Matt Springer, and I write for a geek blog, Alert Nerd, to which I have clumsily grafted a vanity press, called appropriately enough, Alert Nerd Press.

My first novel, which I understand is more accurately a "novella," but which I call a novel in order to make myself feel better when I drift to sleep at night and realize how little I have done to accomplish anything of substance with my life, is entitled Unconventional, and like the fine and funny Planet XY above, it's best termed "geek lit," a novel by a geek for geeks about geeks. Three geeks, at a sci-fi con, drinking and throwing up and reaching major turning points in their lives, in neat and tidy ways that almost never happen in REAL life, but which can happen in my fictional universe if I so deem it appropriate, thank you very much.

You can get the whole damn novel(LA) for free as a PDF here and you can buy it from Lulu for TEN American smackers if you have such funds burning a hole in your pocket.

Here's a taste. Thanks for reading.

Luke Skywalker was just about to take a tumble into Jabba the Hutt’s Rancor pit when Theo got kicked in the balls.

“DORK!” Tommy Livingston screamed as his foot made contact with Theo’s groin. Tears welled in Theo’s eyes and he dropped to his knees, his hands immediately traveling downward to his crotch. He bent his head and fell onto his side.

Tommy was the top dog in fourth grade—not necessarily the most popular kid, and certainly nowhere near the smartest, but definitely the most feared. The lame, the dorky and the weak cowered in his presence—the mere whispered mention of his name was enough to send Danny Mandernach, the sickly albino kid whose mom walked him to school, into bawling hysterics. Decades later, all who were tortured by Tommy Livingston would be advised by their therapists that his bullying tactics were little more than an unfortunate response to his premature physical development—in other words, Tommy was shopping in the big boys’ section at J.C. Penney well before his contemporaries had left their Osh Kosh outfits behind. And running into him working the counter at the local Wendy’s was some consolation once theyhad overcome the psychic scars brought on by his reign of terror.

But in 1984, the kid was just plain scary. Theo felt the full brunt of his fearful power as Tommy stood over his agonized form, grinning his half-toothless grin. Behind him, an ogling crew of his top cronies in the playground Gestapo snickered like cartoon vultures. One of them had planted his boot on top of Theo’s copyof the Return of the Jedi novelization.

I'm also a novelist. After 3 years in Japan, the bizarreness of it all got to me, so I put it into book form, 2 books to be exact. One is fiction, the other non-fiction. I've been sending out queries for the fiction and waiting to hear back. It's literary fiction with elements of magical realism, much like Haruki Murakami, Herman Hesse, etc., set in Tokyo. Here's a bit.

"We drive the rest of the way in a meditative silence. The light music in the background adds to the mysterious feeling growing in my stomach. Tom Waits deep voice prowls the very depths of my organs, giving me time to rewind my life. Childhood memories that I haven’t thought about in years surface to the top in vivid detail; all of the faces of women that I’ve been with flash through my cerebral cortex; smells of campfires and pine trees become present as I fondly remember the camping trips I took with my father. You never know when you’re going to die, so you better have a good look at your life every once in a while.

Charlie’s truck allows us passage through streets that are usually off limits to cars. People stare into the truck, surprised to see two Gaijin driving around in a delivery truck.

Charlie drives down numerous alleys making the occasional left and/or right, and again, I’m lost. Kabuki-cho by night is nothing more than dirty streets, neon and people clawing their way through the crowd trying to get anyone into their bar, club, restaurant, or sex show.

Here they are again, the Okama - trannys, the Yakuza - mafia, college kids passing out tissues, they’re all here on a Wednesday night trying to bring in every businessman they can.

After making various turns, he stops the truck at the corner. It all comes rushing back to me. This is the corner, that is the bar and here I am, waiting and about to deliver myself to the devil himself."

I can also be seen blogging here about my adventures in Tokyo and Los Angeles.

Before I was jailed last year I was writing a Singularity novel. One flashback chapter shows how nanotech, AI and the best of intentions wipes an entire continent free of humans. Oddly no readers to date have seen this as a tragedy.

Suskulan's first serious patient after the upgrade was Zaba, a 12 year old who had been shot through her spine while working in a garden. She was near death, and far beyond help by pre clinic standards, when she was placed in Suskulan's "hands."

As the nanotech mist enveloped her still body, Suskulan quickly evaluated her than told her parents:

"I can heal Zaba . . .

[snip]

Sensing that she wanted to know more, Suskulan generated a wire frame of her body and fed it to her visual circuits.

"The bullet entered the outer edge of your right nipple between ribs, passed through your right lung just missing your heart. It hit the 4th thoracic vertebrae, shattering it and severing your spinal cord." Since butchering animals was a common (but not common enough!) practice at the tata Zaba understood the picture she was seeing.

"That takes a lot of fixing. Your body is being kept very cold so my healing spirits can work fast without burning up."

"How do they work?"

"Ah. Such a simple question; such a hard answer. The problem is you don't have the words; they don't exist in your language. To understand how healing spirits work would require that you learn to read and learn another language."

Zaba, like 99% of the Tamberma, was illiterate. Not that learning to read in her language would have been much help. The only literature in the language was a translation of the Bible, not terribly useful to people with traditional religions.

"Can you teach me this language and how to read?" Zaba asked.

There was a short pause, which was really a very long pause for Suskulan as he projected what would happen and thought about the unstated (though obvious) reason he had been given the upgrade.

"Yes" Suskulan said at last inflecting his voice to a sigh. "But it will change you and the rest of the people of the tata in ways you cannot foresee and may not like. You can sleep through the nine or ten days it will take to finish healing you. Are you sure you want to do this?

"Yes," said Zaba firmly, "I want to learn."

While in jail I started a particularly bitter work. Being an engineer I included the technical details of how to make plutonium in your kitchen (provided your kitchen cooks with neutrons) and how to reduced the complexity of making nukes to the street gang level. A sample is here.

Hernandez had taken an extra four-hour overtime, all of which would go to his divorce lawyer, so he walked Brenda back through the tunnel. In spite of the penalties, he was making small talk to Brenda and thinking about asking her out (and getting in her pants) when there was a glare from both ends of the tunnel, followed at once by the tunnel lurching left and right two or three feet and the lights going off. As Californians, they both thought "Earthquake!"

Hernandez managed to keep his feet after banging his shoulder into the tunnel wall, but Brenda, with her hands chained to her waist, went down hard in the dark. Dust rained down from new and old cracks. Hot air blew in. There was overpressure that nearly popped their eardrums. The air was sucked back out a few seconds later

Hernandez dug out his LED flashlight in the dark.

The right-hand wall had hit Brenda, and the floor had been yanked from under her feet. For all that, in the LED's cold light, she didn't seem to be hurt just a little dazed. Hernandez pulled out his radio and keyed it. The radio squawked the "lockout" tone, indicating the radio would not connect. Hernandez had only a vague idea of what caused a "lockout" tone. (The radio could not contact to any repeaters. This was understandable, since the repeater antennas on the top of the former building were incandescent vapor now being sucked up into the fireball.)

I don't think either of them is commercial, but I would like someone to consider processing the first into a graphic novel.

Brian Gascot here. I'm working on a series of graphic novels (does that count? I hope so.) at the moment.

This is the title page of my in-progress Writer's Bible for my project called Renaissance.

Renaissance, is the story of Captain Hannelo Lior and her crew, her they and the rest of humanity lives in space, and about the Great Dream of Space. The setting is a tough, but not too unpleasant Galaxy in the 27th Century.

I'm still working out the kinks and more information is available upon request.

Hello. My name is John Robinson. I write online under the pen name "Widgett Walls" but when I'm not doing that, I'm just John Robinson.

I have two books in print, one of which is a novel. The other one is short stories, but the Boss called for novels. So.

The novel is called Mystics on the Road to Vanishing Point. It's about two young men coming of age over the course of a summer in a small town. It's as straight a dramatic fiction project as I think I'm going to be able to muster, so I got it out of the way first.

Lisa Mantchev here, newly-minted YA novelist of The Théâtre Illuminata trilogy, forthcoming from Feiwel & Friends. The first book (not yet officially named, but the working title was Scrimshaw,) is due out in the Spring of 2009.

Still in editorial revisions, so no excerpt, but if anyone would like to peruse my short fiction, I have a lot available online and the list can be found at my website.

I spent most of my twenties claiming I wanted to be a novelist. I read a great deal; a degree in English Literature (when properly taught) leaves one with a thirst for the written word that comes a close second to the second line of really good quality amphetamines that seemed to disappear once Thatcher left office.

I spent the first half of my thirties wondering where the fuck my hair had gone, and muttering darkly about being a novelist. On Tuesdays I would huddle in the corner of the spare bedroom with a handgun in one hand and a bottle in the other.

Then I had my mid-life crisis.

I took up jousting, bought a convertible, and actually sat down to write.

I'd like to claim that I wrote the first novel in a week. However that would be a lie; and you did not ask for lies. I know your writing well enough to know that if you wanted lies you'd say "Lie to me!" and there would be a rhythm to the request - three beats, the second one the truth. I managed a first draft in a week though, and then spent three years writing it and re-writing it.

I now have a second manuscript almost finished, a third about half way through but rather bogged down in the entirely gratuitous meta fictional choose-your-own-adventure sex scene, and enough rejection letters to keep me going if I ever get dysentery.

The story of trying to get published lives here http://www.43things.com/people/progress/s0b/695997The blog is at s0b.livejournal.comand I'm not expecting anyone to want to read the extract - you'll just have to wait for the movie.

hello to allhere are my bits. my name is enjie, i'm a writer just starting to shop my first book to publishers. its ultimate genre is scifi/fantasy but i hope it doesn't fit too snuggly in those molds. i''m here because i admire warren's writing tremendously and i'm an internet-born nerd so i am answering the call and using the opportunity to introduce myself.

in brief this is my attempt to write a lighthearted epic of a parallel world called midway where the rules of reality are quite broken such that everything bizarre is ordinary and my hero, gin calamari who is singular in an extraordinary world. it's about how gin comes to threaten the very existence of midway and his pathetic attempts to save it.

i have a poorly updated blog that has an excerpts page with some drafts of the first few tiny chapterlets.

Currently writing short stories that fit together into a big silly romp.Three of them are up at http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID=264877888

An excerpt below from The Tale of the Ten Teacups:

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'If he begins to froth at the mouth' Pasha whispered, handing us each an implement,' or if his eyes start rolling in different directions, hit him in the balls.'Some inner rod of steel tensed inside Miss Menzies as she closed her fingers around the handle of the fork.'Yes, Mr Rapley, in the balls.'Rapley spun back round to face the music. He snapped his heels together and ran his flat palms down the front of his Mackintosh, smoothing his hair back as an afterthought.'Mr Bunting? Percy? It is Percival Bunting, isn't it?All 3 of us walked slowly towards the gloaming entrance, keeping a triangular formation, Rapley at the apex.A dark shaking shambles of a figure tottered from the gloom, wreathed in parasitically clinging whorls of gas, spiralling smoke rags and furious miniature constellations of dust particles.The man was above average height, of advanced years, his once matinee-idol cheekbones and high, distinguished brow reduced to mere pegs upon which to hang the sagging features of his face.A pair of greasy, nocturnal moustaches played out a dark tragedy on his upper lip, and his balding, liverspotted head was punctuated by the sharp, greying prow of a widows peak.He wore a velvet suit, close-cut and deeply unfashionable, dark green and purple stripes running from ankle to collar. A loose black tie puffed up from between white shirt collars.Signs of disrepair were immediately apparent: holes in cuffs, moth-snack lapels, stains of a darkness found only at the bottom of the ocean, a gloopy run of dribble caked one side of his mouth. His shoes were sighing bags of leather.'Please…forgive my appearance', Percival Bunting attempted a creaking bow, 'I have been drinking and..eating my own for the last day and a half and it is true what they say…you are what you eat.'A red mist stormed through Miss Menzies as she leapt forward, brandishing a crumpet fork in an alarming manner.'You..you..fiend! What did you do to poor grandpapa..? His throat..Oh..Devilry!''Violet! Grab her, man!' Shouted Rapley as we both lunged after her. But, as the saying surely goes, a woman scorned should not be armed, and the blur of her arm raced past our optimistic fingertips, burying the business end of the fork in Bunting's right breast with a muffled 'fud'.Miss Menzies stood panting heavily, glaring at the tottering roué, myself and Rapley to either side of her.Percival Bunting briskly looked down at the protuberance and twanged the embedded handle with a wrinkled, meaty finger.'Oh now, please. To be blooded by such a vanquished beauty may make the pulse leap in a younger mans loins, but I am made of older and starker material.' He fixed the young lady with a ghostly, cataract stare and leant in to share the breath of a dead thing.'I am a beast of an inordinately different stripe.'